It's time to let go of your egos, marketers, because this is not about you.

Don't miss a MarketingProfs podcast, subscribe to our free newsletter!

That's a common thing to say, for sure, but it's particularly important to keep in mind when getting into B2B influencer marketing and communities. In the latest episode of Marketing Smarts, Demandbase's Justin Levy emphasizes the importance of partnerships over transactions—an exchange of value over demand. Mutually beneficial activities.

"Too many people will look at simply the reach of an influencer—the total number of followers, or the engagement they have, or the fact that they're a keynote speaker, whatever....and all they want to do is pay them," Justin says. "They don't consider what those areas of expertise are for that person, the brands that they align themselves with and why. Therefore, it's not authentic, for the influencer or for the brand."

In the case of communities, he explains, the most important thing you can do is ask people in the community what they want. Don't try to decide for them. Foster trust and well-being by engaging with them, even if it's just a random question that will take people away from their mundane jobs.

Success may not look like what you expect. So often in B2B, relationships are what will pay off in the long run. "You can run a successful program," says Justin, "but have you built authentic and successful relationships with those individuals?"

The bottom line?

Partnering with influencers and building a community is never about you—it's about using your platform to connect people.

Listen to the entire show from the link above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode.

---

"Marketing Smarts" theme music composed by Juanito Pascual of Signature Tones.

---

Full Transcript: Power Up Your B2B Marketing with Influencer Marketing and Private Communities

George B. Thomas: Are you powered up, are you fueled up, are you ready for some better B2B marketing efforts? Today, I'm super excited, as always, because we get a chance to talk to Justin Levy about powering up your B2B marketing efforts with influencer marketing and private communities. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of stuff, what keeps Justin up at night pertaining to B2B marketers and influencer marketing, private communities, what they look like, how we can leverage them, hurdles, success, and words of wisdom along the way so that you can start to leverage the idea of influencer marketing and private communities for your B2B marketing efforts.

Justin Levy is currently the head of social and influencer marketing at Demandbase. In addition to his role, he also is responsible for leading a private community called Revenue Circle that caters to senior executives in sales and marketing roles. Before joining Demandbase, Justin Levy led social marketing for ServiceNow and managed global social media for Citrix. He was also involved in the launch of a social media agency that worked with well-known Fortune 500 brands.

Justin is an accomplished writer and has contributed to several popular publications, such as MarketingProfs, Content Marketing Institute, and Spiceworks. Justin's work has been recognized multiple times and he has been named a top B2B marketing influencer on several occasions. His influencer programs have also been nominated for industry awards. In addition to his professional accomplishments, Justin is also an author and has written a book called Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign.

Guess what? You get to hear from Justin free today on this podcast. Without further ado, let's jump into the good stuff.

I'm super excited because today we get to power you up, and having the power is very important. We're going to talk about influencer marketing. I know what you might be thinking. George, didn't we just talk about influencer marketing with Mike Alton? Yes, but we're going in a bit of a different direction. But if it's something that we're talking about over and over again, you as the marketer might realize maybe I should start thinking about doing this thing in my business. More importantly, we're going to tie this conversation into influencer marketing in private communities. I am super excited because we're going to be talking to Justin Levy.

Justin, how are you doing today?

Justin Levy: I'm doing well. How are you?

George: I'm doing great. I'm doing better now that you're here. Let's get into the good stuff that everybody wants to hear. I always love starting the podcast with this question. I'm actually kind of going to ask it twice. By the way, I've never asked this question twice, but I feel like I want to know both sides of the conversation that we're talking about today.

Pertaining to influencer marketing, what keeps you up at night when you think of B2B marketers and influencer marketing?

Justin: I think what keeps me up at night is brands that don't approach it correctly. The brands that approach in an authentic way and work with influencers that they trust are the ones that are successful. We see too many brands that want to work with influencers that just want them essentially to be a talking head for them and don't want to co-create the content and partner with them.

What keeps me up at night is making sure that every one of our programs don't look like that, that we're partnered with our creators ahead of time, that we are allowing them to be their authentic selves and that they still have the ability to create the types of content that their community enjoys consuming from them.

George: I love the idea of partnering with versus just paying somebody to do. There's a wide chasm of difference there. I love, too, that you brought up this idea of being authentic to the fact that not only your community, the reason you're bringing in the influencer, but their community will actually still vibe with the content that is being created.

Now that I've mentioned the word community, what the heck keeps you up at night when you think about B2B marketers creating private communities?

Justin: With private communities, one of the things that I care about and constantly think about is providing value to our community, Revenue Circle, that we run and that I lead for us. With that community and with other communities that I monitor, analyze, or am part of, you always have to have the community members' trust and their wellbeing in the front of your mind. You have to monitor them and their behaviors and see what they want to make the community theirs. You can't decide for them. Any program that you're running, even any Google Sheet that you may provide for them, has to be done with that in mind.

George: I love that you brought up the words what they want, because sometimes I feel like businesses and marketers build communities for what they need out of it instead of what the community wants from it.

I want to level set. One of the things I love to do here is let's level set, let's everybody be on the same conversation. We might be using the words private community, and somebody might think we're talking about membership websites. We might say private community and somebody else might think we're talking about Facebook. Maybe both. Maybe none.

Justin, when we talk about private communities moving forward, what do you really mean, what does this look like for a B2B business when we say private communities?

Justin: If you think about it in the way that mutual friend of ours Chris Penn terms it, he terms it velvet communities or online velvet communities, the velvet rope. Pertinent to this conversation, and I agree with you, we have social communities, we have customer communities and things of that nature, but private communities in the way that I think about them are the types of private communities you belong to on Slack, Discord, or any of the white label type of communities like Mighty Networks or areas like that.

Usually, they are a gathering place for people around like-minded topics. If you're a marketing ops professional, there's MO Pros, which is meant for marketing ops folks to discuss those types of topics that are pertinent to that role.

George: It's interesting. I do want to go off the beaten path because there are two questions that popped up in my brain with that. When we think about these private communities, is there a tool or tools that you find, because you mentioned Slack and Mighty Networks, is there one that if somebody is listening and they want to dip their toes into this that they might think of? That's question number one. Maybe talk about the tools that they have at their fingertips. Question two is around the idea of paid versus non-paid community. Can you unpack a little bit around both of those topics for me?

Justin: Yes. For networks, I think the two most prevalent and easily top of mind for folks is going to be Slack and Discord. If you're in the B2B industry, you're more than likely on Slack on a daily basis. If you're exploring other communities or you're a creative type focused person, maybe you're in creative circles or you're into certain creative areas personally, you might be in Discord, so that might be a natural place for you to live. We have seen successful B2B style communities in Discord. Joe Pulizzi's The Tilt lives in Discord, and his is probably the most successful I know that's there. There's kind of an endless number of Slack based communities right now.

On the paid versus free, of course there is a need for critical mass to have a paid community. Probably the most successful there is Pavilion, which has three different levels—associate, executive, and CEO—and of course the pricing differs. You also have Peak, which is a browser based community that runs on Mighty Networks, that's a paid community. The vast majority though are going to be free because you want the barrier to entry to be as low as possible.

George: I love that so much. It gives the Marketing Smarts listeners some tools that they can go look at and start to investigate, but also a mindset of when or when not to monetize their community, as well as some great examples that you just gave that they can go look at for what is doing well or something to model.

Joe Pulizzi, by the way, the godfather of content marketing. If you haven't checked out the interview that we did with him, you definitely need to check out that episode. It was absolutely amazing.

Let's tie this all together. We're talking about influencer marketing, we're talking about private communities. Why is it important to power up one's B2B marketing efforts with influencer marketing in conjunction with private communities? How the heck does that all work?

Justin: With influencer marketing, the most powerful piece of that is to build relationships with thought leaders in the space. Now, you should do that across a wide spectrum. You're not just going to build or try to build relationships with some of the top influencers that would be considered macro influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers and some of the top most influential voices. Folks like Ann Handley, Jay Baer, or some of these individuals that are focused on B2B marketing.

You also need very small niche influencers. Some of those that are likely to go very deep on one topic. Their network and their area of focus might be field marketing, or ABM, or event-led growth, or something of that nature. It's important to form those types of relationships so that when you run a program, it's across all of that. You might run a multilayered program where you need broad awareness and then you need something more tactical.

With private communities, you need to develop a community where you have truly one-to-one relationships with the community manager and the community members, but then you're helping them to form together in a community. For example, we recently had two of our community members go and get together for golf. We never set it up. They found out that they lived within two hours of one another, and they mutually invited each other to their respective golf clubs. I only found out about it because they posted a photo in the community.

If you look at combining the two, influencer and community, one of the things that we do within Revenue Circle is to bring in thought leaders, these influencers, to do virtual events on areas that are important to either the industry or to the community, and we let the community decide that. For example, generative AI, we just did one with Paul Roetzer. Super timely. The community was asking a lot of questions about it ahead of time. Paul and I are friends, so I reached out to him and asked him if he could come and do a 45-minute session for us. Joe Pulizzi is coming in and doing a session for us next week on content marketing, the creator economy, and where people should be focused.

The second layer to that (and this typically costs some money if a brand wants to invest in it) is to actually hire influencers to create unique content within that community. Something that's of value that you can only get from that community. We are working with Jay Bear, and Jay does a question of the week where he poses it, and then in the way that only Jay can, he gives a bottle of tequila away to the best answer as he decides. It drives engagement with the community, it's on something topical around sales and marketing, whatever is in the news currently, and they like that they have this one-to-one relationship with someone that they can typically only pay a couple thousand dollars to see keynote at a conference.

George: I love this. When I heard the give away a bottle, I was like that's fun, that's creative ideas. When you talk about the folks going golfing together, now it's not just this virtual community, it's real world connections. More importantly, what I heard was this ability to be a great connector. Bringing in people that usually you would not have access to, but because you're part of this community, you now have access to them to be able to hear thoughts, implement their ideas, things like that.

It's interesting because the next question that I want to ask is around how to get started with this idea of a private community and influencer marketing. But my brain, as I heard you talking, tweaked a little bit. If you're going to start a private community and bring these people in, I almost think that you will start to create yourself as an influencer to be able to connect with other influencers, to easily bring those relationships to your community. Maybe unpack a little bit of how to get started with influencer marketing in a way that helps you grow private communities, but a side tangent after that could totally be and to grow yourself you might want to think about these things to make your life easier.

Justin: Sure. I'll see if we can do it all in one answer. If you think about influencer marketing and you're just looking to get started in it, maybe you're new in your position or your company is starting to put a focus on it, you may or may not have a budget. Obviously, a budget allows you to do some broader activities and some more creative activities.

A very simple rinse-and-repeat activity you can do is identify a top list of folks that are in your ICP, or in a market maybe that you want to focus on. Most people boo-hoo listicles because it's the top 50 B2B marketers, and they appear on 20 lists because it's always the same folks, but they can be powerful if you take the next steps in them. That's where the really hard work goes into it.

We'll take a list, and we just did this with the 25 Sales Executives to Learn From in 2023. We did very manual research to closely identify those sales executives, as we defined as VPs and above. We did one-to-one outreach to those folks with custom messages, so each one of those emails came directly from me, it wasn't sent through Marketo or anything like that. We had our creative team—or you can use something like Canva if you don't have a creative team—create a social card that had their headshot, their name, their company, and all that good stuff, with our logo and 25 Sales Executives to Learn From. They go share that. Hopefully, a good percentage of them shares that online, because now you're bringing awareness back to your company and you're driving them to the blog post where you've announced these people. Great.

Wait one or two weeks and follow back up with them to feature them in an ebook. The way that I do that is I follow up and say, "We want to feature you in an ebook. Can you give me a two-minute reply to this question?" For Demandbase, that question is on a focus area or a theme that we're going after in that quarter and we really want to know people's opinions for that quarter.

Additionally, I use that to promote the membership to Revenue Circle because they fit the criteria that we want, "If you want to join Revenue Circle, this is also what we're about over here." Revenue Circle gains a membership there, we'll get our responses back to the ebook. We'll work on designing the ebook, and then go back out to them with quote cards that they've used and we'll take those quotes and design the ebook. We'll also design one, two, or more blog posts based on those quotes.

Now you've had three, four, five touchpoints with these influencers, the people you're recognizing. That creates a wonderful two-way relationship, both with the person internally that is reaching out, but also as the brand. One of the things that we've seen, one of the byproducts, is nearly immediately when we reach out to these folks, they'll update their LinkedIn profiles to say top 25 so-and-so by Demandbase, or whatnot. And for the one to two weeks after, we'll see that blog post be one of the top five or top ten pages across our entire website, which is hundreds of pages for a company of our size.

One, that's an influencer program, you're building those relationships, things of that nature. Two, you're gaining membership into your community. For us, it's Revenue Circle. I'd say that's kind of number one.

Number two, if you don't have relationships with some of the larger influencers, reach out to them, build those relationships. You might do something like if you want to ask them to come be in the community to do a virtual event or what have you. Do something that you know they care about.

For some of the thought leaders that we've worked with, say Ann and Joe, they have new books out. Buy some copies of the book. Book sales are a big deal to them right now, it helps get their voice more out into the wild and gets these new thoughts from them out there. When we worked with Paul, though Paul has a published book, generative AI is moving so fast that it was probably out of date the week before it was published, but he has an online course and certification program that is constantly updated. I worked with him to provide the members with a discount. Not only was it of value to the community, but if they sign up, it's a value to Paul and his company.

We try to work both of those one-to-one in the ways that we can, besides the other independent programs that we'll do that are focused solely on influencer marketing or solely on the community.

George: Listeners, I hope you had your tablet, your notepad, your crayons, spray paint on the wall if you have to, and I hope you were taking notes, because that's probably the rewind spot that I would tell you to go back and relisten to that. There's a couple of good models in there.

I love the fact as I heard you talking it was add value, add value, add value. Add value to the people that you want to connect with instead of just trying to extract value for yourself out of it. When I heard you talking about the thread that you were kind of sewing between ebook, this, and that, I thought of an episode we did with Andy Crestodina where he talked about content confetti. Your model lines up with on the flip side of building that relationship, you're also building content confetti and you're figuring out multiple ways to use this relationship across the board. Definitely check out that episode, if you haven't.

The thing here is I want to go back to if you're adding value to the people that you're trying to connect with, that's going to allow you to add value to the community. If you add value to the community, over time that's actually going to bring you into the world of being a micro influencer yourself. Now it's like a flywheel. It becomes very much easier to get people like Justin, Joe, Jay, whoever, to say, "I'd love to be on your podcast," or, "I'd love to help you with your private community. I'd love to be on that webinar event," because now it is about human-to-human relationships.

Unfortunately, somehow, some way, people jack it up along the way. So, one of the things that I like to talk about on this podcast is the hurdles or the potholes that they might face. What are some hurdles along the way while B2B marketers are trying to use influencer marketing and build a community that you're like just stop?

Justin: On the influencer side, as I mentioned, I definitely think it's the talking head versus partnership. Too many people will look at simply the reach of an influencer, the total number of followers, or the engagement they have, or the fact that they're a keynote speaker, or whatever those things are that they care about, and all they want to do is pay them. They don't consider what those areas of expertise are for that person, maybe the brands that they align themselves with or why. Therefore, it's not authentic for that influencer or for that brand. You might have a misalignment of values. You might be asking them to create content that is not natural for them. That's mistake number one for a brand when they're working with influencers is not having that co-created value where it benefits both the brand and the influencer.

On the private community side, probably the thing that drives me crazy is brands that want to build this third-party community, it's not their community, I tend to think about it as powering a community. Demandbase powers Revenue Circle, which means at the end of the day we pay all the bills, but it's not a Demandbase community, we're not selling our wares in there, we just utilize our resources to provide value. Where companies get it wrong is they build up this community, they utilize it to build trust, and then they violate that trust by doing something wrong, whether it is selling their wares, whether it's utilizing the list they've built to market towards them, anything of that nature.

The way we see Revenue Circle is it's walled off from Demandbase. With the exception of if Demandbase does a study with a third-party vendor that maybe is really interesting, maybe we come out with a state of advertising report or something of that nature, and those statistics might be helpful to the community, that's one thing. But we're not going to promote that Demandbase came out with this new feature launch within the product. That will never go into the community. Too often I see that with other communities.

George: I'm so glad you brought it up, and the words you used felt aggressive, but they should be aggressive; when you violate their trust. Trust is such a hard thing to gain, but it's such an easy thing to lose. Being an advocate, a champion for how do we continue to build trust through these communities and not erode it over time, that is probably a genius growth strategy in itself to just not violate the trust. I said this earlier in the podcast, what are you trying to get out of it instead of what are trying to give into it for the community. I love that you hit a never-do-that.

Let's dive back into private communities for a second. What are some must-dos? You're focused on building a private community, you must do these one, two, maybe three things that are going to help that grow, help it be more connected, help it be more engaged. Where does your brain go, Justin?

Justin: You have to let the community decide the type of content they want. I'll give a really good example of what happened within our community.

Many communities do question of the day. It helps to drive engagement, it brings a community together, it's something fun to look forward to for everyone. Most communities do it around the topic that they're formed around. If they're an analytics community, maybe it's GA4. If it's around generative AI, maybe it's something that has just come out like ChatGPTwith GPT 4.0. Things like that. That is well and good. That's why you've joined those communities is to learn more about those areas, to get the expertise and insights.

When we launched Revenue Circle focused on B2B sales and marketers in VP and above roles right now, my mind went to we're going to do a question of the day and I'm going to ask more serious questions that these folks may care about like budget, planning, and focus areas for 2023, and stuff like that. There were, for the most part, crickets.

I sat back and one day there was a very strong debate, I guess we could call it, in the analytics for marketers community that Katie Robbert and Chris Penn run about whether pineapple belongs on pizza. For any listener, it belongs on pizza. Don't argue with me. It should go there. I said that's great, let's try this and see what happens. I posted it in Revenue Circle, and it was by far the number one most engaged question that we had asked. It made me step back and think maybe these executives spend their whole day worried about budget, in meetings about planning, and things like that, so maybe they just want some relief if they're going to take a minute out of their day.

From that point forward, every question of the day has been something lighthearted and fun. This week we've done do shoes belong in a house and do you wash your clothes after you take the tag off and before you wear them. What I noticed out of that conversation was almost every guy rips the tag off and wears the clothes immediately, most of the women take the tag off and wash the clothes. These are the most random questions, to the point that I've had community members ask me where the hell I think about these things from.

That drives all of this engagement and fun. People have fun showing pictures of their dogs or their cats, or sharing recipes of their favorite cocktails, things of that nature. The way we got there was letting the community decide and listening, even passively, to what the community's responses were and how they wanted this community to form and be.

Another area that we did this with recently was we decided we wanted to do a weekly wrap up. If you missed anything, here's all of the stuff from the week, especially now as we have so much going on. Almost every community that I'm part of sends an email, so my inbox fills up at the end of the week with emails. I decided I wanted to try to pivot from that. I asked the community for their feedback, "Do you want me to send an email, or would you rather some type of update in the community?" They all said, without a shadow of a doubt, they don't want email. So, I built a structure in a PDF platform, and at the end of the week I build out a PDF and post it. I'll tag certain people in some highlights, I'll pin it to that channel, and that will be the weekly wrap up for our community. They engage with that and they find that helpful because we let them decide on it.

I think that besides some of the other things, like measure all your efforts so you know what to put the gas pedal on moving forward and areas that are, hopefully, pretty straightforward and easy, just let the community decide what they want, and don't try to decide for them.

George: So many good gems and nuggets that people hopefully are listening to and if they have a community, they can start to implement. I love this idea of fun questions. M&Ms versus Skittles, or do you just mix them together and go nuts, things like that. My favorite; peanut butter and pickle sandwiches, what's your take on it? Here's the thing. We have to kind of land this plane. This has been an amazing interview filled with great value for the Marketing Smarts listeners and the MarketingProfs community. I have two more questions that I want to ask. One, I want to know, in your mind, what does influencer and private community success look like? Let's start there.

Justin: With influencer marketing, I think that success looks like the relationships that you build at the end of the day and how authentic those relationships are. You can run a successful program, and that's well and good. But have you built authentic and successful relationships with those individuals?

Everything I do—it can be influencer, it can be community, it can be other projects that I get myself involved in—I think about them as is this a case study worthy program? Is this the type of program that we nominate as a case study? Will those individuals feel good about it if it's nominated? Say a program that maybe I run with Joe Pulizzi or Ann Handley. Would it be something that they would hold up at Content Marketing World, for a content award, or at MarketingProfs and be proud that their name was associated with that work that we did with them? We've seen that with influencer programs that we've run.

Same with the community. If we built that authentic and trustworthy community to where the folks that we've worked with, the influencers we've worked with, as well as the community are willing to engage with it, both within the community so that engagement rate and growth, recommendation to other individuals, but are they willing to post about it externally without being prompted? I think that's success.

We had multiple members of Revenue Circle post on LinkedIn after events or in response to other questions. They'll post about how valuable they see Revenue Circle. That means more to me, frankly, than if they answer the question of the day today.

George: So good. The last question that I like to ask, because you've been on this journey, you've done influencer marketing, you are an influencer, you have a community that you've been rocking out, we all have these journeys, which means we gain some wisdom along the way. What are some words of wisdom that you would like to impart to the Marketing Smarts B2B marketing audience?

Justin: I think there are probably three. One is something that Chris Brogan imparted on me almost 15 years ago, because we've both been at it for a while now and spent a lot of time together when we ran an agency together. He always told me to be a connector. You mentioned this earlier. To always use your platform and your relationships to connect other people together, and it's never about you.

I get my joy and I feel successful off of being able to utilize my relationships to connect with them others in influencer marketing and community that they may not have unless they go and spend a couple of thousand dollars at Content Marketing World to get connected with folks that are taking the main stage, for example, or connecting in this job market to people that I know are hiring and/or are looking for a job. We had that happen in Revenue Circle recently, a CMO hired someone to be their VP. So, being a connector.

Something I've also learned throughout my career that applies to a lot of things is to always be two steps ahead. One of the areas, and this is more internally that I try to do this, but also externally, is to try to stay two steps ahead of whatever is happening around me. Internally, I use that to try to stay two steps ahead of, let's say, my manager, so that when they ask for something, I've already got it done. Because you don't know the timeframe or reasoning behind why they are asking for it. Say my VP might ask for a report. I want to have that done before he ever thinks he needs it, because he potentially is being asked by my CMO for something. If I can have it to him immediately, he can make his tweak or two and send it to our CMO, that makes him look more prepared and better, and he's leading his team better.

Externally, if you can stay two steps ahead, you're staying two steps ahead of your competition or the other communities in your space, or the people that are trying to work with fellow influencers. Hopefully, you're being more creative and taking what you've learned from other campaigns or other things you've noticed and trying to implement that.

I think the last is to always measure your efforts. You have to measure what you do, and then you have to learn from it. Too often I think in marketing as a whole we just measure everything and say that we're data-driven, and we don't let the data actually drive us.

In influencer marketing, say with a paid program, I measure something called CPE, cost per engagement. It's the only way that I know how to level set all of the folks that I work with, because it provides an equal benchmark between the person that charged an X sum of money and gets X engagements and someone that is maybe charging more or less and gets a certain number of engagements. I shouldn't continue a relationship for the next program if that CPE is different than another, unless there is a very targeted reason.

The same with the community. I mentioned the question of the day. I utilized not only what the community was giving for feedback, but what the engagement numbers told me, and that I continued to put the gas pedal on.

George: Marketing Smarts listeners, did you take lots of notes? I have to ask, what is your one thing, your number one execution opportunity after this podcast episode? Make sure you reach out and let us know in my inbox or on Twitter using the hashtag #MPB2B.

I also have to ask are you a free member of the MarketingProfs community yet? If not, head over to Mprofs.com/mptoday. You won't regret the additional B2B marketing education that you'll be adding to your life.

We'd like it if you could leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app, but we'd love it if you would share this episode with a coworker or friend. Until we meet in the next episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast where we talk with Steve Multzer about the three pillars of winning communication, value, passion, and connection, I hope you do just a couple of things. One, reach out and let us know what conversation you'd like to listen in on next. Two, focus on getting 1% better at your craft each and every day. Finally, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble B2B marketing human. We'll see you in the next episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast.

...sign up for free to continue reading

Don't miss a MarketingProfs podcast, subscribe to our free newsletter!

Published on April 27, 2023